Electronic program guide data for a television-based entertainment and information system includes information that describes programs such as television shows and movies. Program guide data can include such information as a program title, a program broadcast day and time, and a short description of the program. Program guide data can also include information such as program ratings, characters, actor names, station identifiers, channel identifiers, other schedule information, and so on.
Program guide data includes information and common words often repeated to describe the same programs that are broadcast or otherwise available each day at the same time, for example. Typically, the program titles, channel identifiers, much of the schedule information, and many of the program descriptions are repeated from one day to the next.
The program guide data is represented as string data that is typically encoded with the UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format-8) eight-bit encoding scheme. The UTF-8 encoding scheme can be used to encode string data that is represented with most of the characters that are defined by the UNICODE standard. This includes the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters, and UTF-8 uses the same values as ASCII to represent those characters that are common to both encodings. Both the UTF-8 and ASCII encoding schemes use the character values of 0x20 to 0x7F (hex) to represent alphanumeric characters in the program guide data such as letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and the most common special characters. A value 0x00 (hex) is commonly used as a null terminator to indicate the end of a string of data.
In UTF-8 and ASCII encoding schemes, the values 0x01 to 0x1F (hex) (i.e., the values between 0x00 and 0x20) are commonly used to represent control characters, such as backspace, tab, return, escape, and the like. However, program guide data does not typically include, or otherwise use, these control characters and is therefore not encoded with values from 0x01 to 0x1F.